Woven Spring Dishtowels

In spite of a weekend with weather that reminded me more of February than the end of March (can you say waking up to snow on Sunday morning?), it was a good weekend for taking a deep breath and letting my mind and hands wander.  There was knitting, weaving and baking and a bit of reading (often while knitting), so both mind and hands were happy with the weekend.

I've had these dishtowels finished for quite some time.  On "problem" I have with posting about weaving, is that because I am learning, I have all these things that I want to talk about.  Color, texture, technique, weave structures are all possible discussions for even a simple project.  Often, it's the pictures that I take (or forget to take) that end up shaping what I talk about.

These cotton towels all came from the warp I talked about a little while back.  My original plan was a set of 4 identical towels for my kitchen, but after weaving the first towel and getting a good handle on what it would take to deal with all the color changes, I decided that I would rather use the rest of the warp for experimentation and that my experimentation would get divided into towel shaped parts at the end.

These are three of the towels before they went through the washing machine.  The one to the far left was my original design.  The one in the center was my bastardized "basketweave" attempt and the one on the right was an experiment in warp and weft faced "lace" patterns on my rigid heddle loom (achieved with the help of the pick up stick).

This is a more up close and personal look at the first towel.  While I like the pattern a lot, after a while, I got tired of fiddling with 4 shuttles and hiding the ends with a thick cotton yarn.  My design did not work well for carrying the unused colors up the side.  So after one iteration of what I wanted to try I moved onto something else. (Yes, there are the same number of picks in the center square as in the ones to either side of it, somehow my beating got uneven).

This is the modified basketweave.  Since I couldn't lift two side by side warp threads at once, I did two warp shots into each shed (the fabric is rotated on it's side so that the warp is horizontal in the picture).   But after a bunch of inches of this, I got bored with it, too, and decided to pull out my pick up stick and play with woven "lace".

Here you can see how different the fabric looks when I use either the white, blue or yellow yarn as the weft for an extended period of time.  In the white and blue examples. you can see that there are warp threads "floating" over a group of weft threads.  For the yellow example the opposite is true: the weft threads are floating over the warp threads.  Of course, these fabrics are not the same on both sides.  If you were to flip them over, the blue and white fabrics would have floating weft threads while the opposite side of the yellow area would have floating warp threads.  I really liked the look and texture of the white and blue "samples" so I extended them for longer regions.

This picture (taken before I cut the towels apart) illustrates another property of woven cloth: plain weave is "wider" than weave structures where you go over and under two or more threads (this has to do with how the threads can pull together, and I'll probably talk about it more some other time when I can show some better examples).  So if you're going to have a project like this one, you want to make sure that you maintain a similar number of warp threads that you go over and under during the course of one unit in your project, otherwise the edges will get wonky -- not unlike matching knit ribbing to stockinette. 

Just like the original project changed, even the final location of the results changed.  I didn't really know how much this cotton would shrink (yes, sampling would have good for this) and it ended up shrinking more than I anticipated (measuring before and after would have been a good idea, too...) so the final towels were smaller than I expected.  So rather than dishtowels, I'm going to use them as hand towels for my powder room.  Their different sizes won't be so obvious used that way, and I'll get to enjoy the woven texture more, too.